A researcher, international consultant and practitioner with extensive inter-disciplinary experience in public policy, development, technology and sustainability, Aromar Revi is a founding Director of TARU, a leading South Asian research consulting firm. He has lectured and taught widely in India and the West, and has been a senior advisor to various ministries of the Government of India, including the national Planning Commission and consulted with a wide range of multilateral and bilateral development institutions including World Bank, UNEP, UNU and DFIF.
Formally trained as a technologist, lawyer, management, and finance specialist, he was one of the first researchers from the South to apply ecological systems analysis and design methods to then fuzzy concept of sustainability in the mid-1980s. He has worked on a number of consultancy and research assignments for multilateral and bilateral institutions on economic, environmental and social change at the global and regional scale.
He specializes in multi-level development planning, the political economy of institutional change, and implementation of multi-sectoral public policy and development initiatives. Aromar has worked extensively on the neglected public-private-community interface area in the energy, water, health, human settlements and ICT sectors in South Asia. Over the last two years, he has worked with a research team on the dynamics of decentralised governance in India. He had also researched th restructuring of legal and regulatory regime of the energy, water and urban real estate sectors in India, which are central to the process of ongoing economic reform.
Mr Revi has made considerable recent progress in developing a conceptual framework for the long-term planning, economic transformation and design of sustainable cities and in helping define the scaffolding of what may become known in time as ‘Sustainability Theory’. He was the team leader of the international award winning Goa 2100 Sustainable RUrban systems project that developed a vision; design and investment plan for a 30-year sustainability transition for a region in western India. This was based on a regional and local scenario analysis benchmarked to trends from key global models.
He has made significant contributions to human settlements development in India, for which he was elected as Ashoka Fellow in 1990. This includes a key role in the design of India’s national public housing programme- the facilitates the building of over 2 million rural houses a year; infrastructure planning; upgrading and institutional reform in a number of million plus cities. Mr Revi has served on high-level communities of the Government of India and was responsible for the development of housing and urban development sectoral plans for two-thirds of India’s state in the early 1990s. This provided him through extensive fieldwork and ravel, a unique insight into the immense complexity and diversity of the country.
Mr Revi is one of South Asia’s leading disaster mitigation and management experts and has led emergency teams to assess, plan and execute recovery and rehabilitation million people. The experience of these extreme events has provided him deep insight also provided Aromar a strong incentive to examine ‘sustainability’ in both its empirical and theoretical dimensions. He is currently leading the development India’s firs state-level comprehensive multi-hazard vulnerability and loss due to natural and man-made hazards and climate=change related processes, and underpin the development of appropriate fiduciary risk mitigation instruments.
Driven by a vision of leveraging India’s considerable IT skills to assist in e=governance, sector reform and market consolidation, Mr Revi led a World Bank funded pilot project for the infrastructure sector in India. This has further lead him into advanced research into financial valuation methods for high technology firms- a critical analytical problem underlying the recent dot=com meltdown. The inter-comparison of US and Indian financial markets will help in the strategic development of a sector that will contribute over 6% of India’s GDP by 2008.
Aromar has extensive cross-cultural and inter-institutional experience having worked for public, private and civil society institutions and with a wide range of communities. He is deeply concerned about the future of South Asia, the governance, structural dynamics and human development and their combined impact on a global social, economic and environmental security He firmly believes that a successful sustainability transition in South Asia, will tip the balance in favour of a more humane global future.